In the spirit of sharing between Bogleheads and FWF (and finiki), there is a quick method to create links from the wiki for posting in the forum. The wiki pages currently have a footer that provides a link that can be copied and pasted into a forum posting, but with the help of a browser add-on, it is much simpler to link into a forum post.

Make Link website wrote:Make Link is an extension for Mozilla Firefox which adds a context menu item (Make Link) which allows the user to easily copy links to the clipboard in HTML, forum-code or simple "text (URL)" format.

Create Link (Chrome) is based on Make Link and operates the same way.

Create Link only provides for plain text and HTML links out of the box so add a BBCode option using this syntax: %htmlEscapedText% (tip of the hat to Bylo).

The neat thing about these tools is they can be used to create a link from any website that you'd like to include in a forum post.

Since I don't use IE unless absolutely necessary, I don't know if an equivalent add-on/extension exists.

Normal people… believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet. – Scott Adams

Because this requires work from the users, it will never have wide adoption. It's better to do it from the forum software side, as is done in the Early Retirement forum, where every link posted will automatically have its title retrieved and displayed.

I just installed Create Link in Chrome. The %input% variable is supposed to pop up a dialogue to enter text, but does not do so for me. Has anyone else tried this and got it working? I am on a Chromebook if it matters.

Kevin M wrote:I just installed Create Link in Chrome. The %input% variable is supposed to pop up a dialogue to enter text, but does not do so for me. Has anyone else tried this and got it working? I am on a Chromebook if it matters.

Kevin

I've never had the occasion to use the %input% variable. I just tried it out and also can report no dialog box to enter text. What are you trying to accomplish?

Normal people… believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet. – Scott Adams

Kevin M wrote:I just installed Create Link in Chrome. The %input% variable is supposed to pop up a dialogue to enter text, but does not do so for me. Has anyone else tried this and got it working? I am on a Chromebook if it matters.

Kevin

I've never had the occasion to use the %input% variable. I just tried it out and also can report no dialog box to enter text. What are you trying to accomplish?

Create a forum link in which I can enter my own text instead of the page title or highlighted text, which I would expect this to do:

I'm bumping this 3-year old thread to mention another Firefox add-on that can turn any link into the BBCode format used by the forum software. It can also format links for the wiki. See this Firefox add-on: CoLT

That being said, Make Link :: Add-ons for Firefox is working just fine. I had a compatibility issue, but reinstallation of the extension fixed the problem. Perhaps it's the new implementation of Mozilla forcing signed extensions.*

Make Link is also much simpler to use, but its last update was in 2011. I wanted to mention the CoLT alternative in case Make Link disappears.

I've switched to Chrome with the Create Link extension until I can find a substitute.

The reason I used Firefox is that the Make Link extension allowed you to hover over a link and capture the text. Chrome didn't do that, so I needed to select the link text manually. It was more work and prone to error. This may be a limitation of Chrome's API.

Until Make Link is rewritten or a substitute is found, Chrome will be my primary browser.

To some, the glass is half full. To others, the glass is half empty. To an engineer, it's twice the size it needs to be.

Create Link only provides for plain text and HTML links out of the box so add a BBCode option using this syntax: %htmlEscapedText% (tip of the hat to Bylo).

For those unfamiliar with how to do the above, after adding the Create Link extension:
1) Left click on the three vertical dots at the top right of a Chrome page ("Customize and control Google Chrome")
2) Left click on More Tools > Extensions
3) Left click Options in the Create Link section
4) Add the BBCode option at a place of your choosing. I used the third row:

Both "Make Link" and "CoLT" now show "This add-on is not compatible with your version of Firefox" (version 57.0 - 64 bit) that was auto-installed within the past day or so.

Anyone know of a working Firefox add-on?

All plug-ins will have to make changes to be compatible with Firefox 57. Give it a little time for the plug-in authors to make the changes.

If you don't want to wait, you can switch to Firefox ESR (extended-support-release), which is based off an older version of Firefox for the features, but receives all the security updates of the latest version of Firefox. Firefox ESR will not switch over to this new model of Firefox until March, which gives plenty of time for active plug-in authors to update their plug-ins.

One issue with Make Link is that the plugin appears abandoned - the developer's website links are broken. Unless another developer comes up with a replacement, Chrome appears to be the only long-term solution.

To some, the glass is half full. To others, the glass is half empty. To an engineer, it's twice the size it needs to be.

The latest update has deprecated the format variables in Link Text and Location Copier. (For some reason, the add-on doesn't work on the Mozilla page. Elsewhere, yes. Mozilla.org, no.)

As noted in the developer's home page, Table 1, "Context dependant custom format variables" may be deprecated. I can confirm they have been deprecated (found the info in a user review). If your links suddenly contain "undefined", this is why. Here's my new configuration.